Turning Point

It feels to me like time suddenly sped up. The first week of August has come and gone already! We have reached the

Turning Point

of the summer season and are moving from the height of summer towards the beginning of fall. I can no longer pretend that summer will last forever or that somehow I can stretch these long summer days out to fill more of the year. Instead I take time to remind myself to appreciate these waning summer days.

I have a quote and a poem I would like to share with you today. The first, a quote from the book Tuck Everlasting and the second a poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer.

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.”
― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

Isn’t that a beautiful way to describe this time of year?

And this poem, oh how I love it. I like to think of myself standing in the middle of a cloud and the divine swirl of life, astonished with it’s beauty, humbled by it’s holy grace.

Inside It All

Beneath the masks, beneath the names,
beneath ideals, beneath the shoulds
is a thrumming, ecstatic atomic swirl,
unseen and omnipresent, inescapable
and holy—a divine blurring of being,
a realm of charge and energy—
most of it empty space. Sometimes,
I remember this. Perhaps walking
in the woods or standing in the midst
of a city’s whir, perhaps working in the kitchen
or singing in a choir, I remember
who we really are, remember
not with mind but with being,
and I’m lost in it, found in it,
alive in the cloud of it, astonished
with the sacred design of it,
elegant soup of it,
elemental swirl of it all.
How is it I sometimes
see only woman, man,
cottonwood, spider, self, other,
other, other, other?
We walk this journey
of separation together.
Oh being who is lonely,
remember?

   — Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

And here’s one more poem by my favorite poet

August

When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend

all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking

of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body

accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among

the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.

   — Mary Oliver

As we savor these days after the turning point of summer, may we sense the wonder of life and feel gratitude for each minute of each day.

May you walk in beauty.

Note: Today I played with fading gladiolus flowers.